Giant Leaps: Apollo 11 Alums Reflect 40 Years Later at MIT Conference

Oct 1, 2009

"Mr. Sorenson," began Mr. Theodore Sorenson last Thursday morning at MIT's Giant Leaps conference in Cambridge, Mass., as he addressed a question to himself. The special counsel and speechwriter to President John F. Kennedy demonstrated his eloquence, not to mention wit, remained well intact nearly fifty years later. "Isn't prestige a thin basis for such a massive expenditure?" he asked, referring to the billions of dollars dedicated to the effort of sending man to the moon.

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The conference offered a rare opportunity for an audience of Apollo alumni and aspiring students to hear from, if not Kennedy himself, his closest advisor when the country toed the starting line of the Space Race. "The Soviet Union and its communist allies around the world were intent on not only expanding their influence and borders, but winning others to their cause," Sorenson answered. "One way of doing that was to demonstrate superior scientific and technical ability." The motivation behind Kennedy's ambitious goal ran deeper than prestige, or even aspiration, Sorenson says: If the Soviets could send a man into space, people could assume Communism had something to it—and Kennedy knew the U.S. must have a rejoinder.

As other key figures in the Apollo program reflected on their experiences to the rapt attendees, a number of valuable axioms emerged:

"If you're going to do somethingtruly novel,there isn't anybody who could tell you how long it's going to take or how much it's going to cost." NASA's contract with Grumman stipulated three things: performance, schedule and cost. "Well, it didn't take us long to figure out that it didn't quite work that way," Gavin said. "Performance was absolutely critical. Schedule will come next, and cost was a derivative of the first two."—Joe Gavin, director, Lunar Module Program, Grumman Aerospace Corporation.

"There's no such thing as a random failure." If the design has been done properly, there has to be a reason for the failure that an engineer can catch and fix. In the course of Apollo, Grumman recorded more than 14,000 anomalies, and of those only 22 defied analysis. "In the case of those 22 we changed something anyhow."—Gavin

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"One should take absolutely nothing for granted." At one point, a young Grumman engineer working on the instrument panel realized that he didn't know what was inside the case of standard toggle switches, hundreds of which were used in the lunar landers. So he took apart dozens of them—and a third of these contained a little ball of free solder. "In zero gravity who knows what that might have done."—Gavin "If you want to leave your footprints in the sands of time, I strongly recommend the moon over Washington." Because the only erosion that occurs on the surface of the moon is from small meteorites, footprints remain in recognizable form for about a million years. (Administrations turn over every four.) —Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut, mission scientist for Apollo 11. "You have to fly what you've got." Once the vehicle leaves the pad, the time has passed for swapping out parts. "That's the crux of flight control: I got to fly what you gave me. There's no time to stop and fix it."—Chris Kraft, director of flight operations, Mission Control. "Space flight is inexorably entwined with politics." World response to the flights of Yuri Gagarin and Al Shepard was swift and strong—and followed immediately by Kennedy's challenge to send man to the moon. "I remember that day very clearly. I thought he'd lost his mind. We had not yet launched John Glenn into space … but suddenly I had to figure out the orbital mechanics of how you get back and forth to the moon."—Kraft

Which brings us back to Sorenson. What would Kennedy think of U.S. activity in space today? He would be pleased in terms of its lasting achievement, such as medical advances and satellite-enabled technologies. But Kennedy's plea for space as a preserve of peace is now being endangered, Sorenson said. "He set out to prevent the militarization of space… the fact that the U.S. in the last decade has talked more and more of the military uses of space would have disturbed him greatly."—Jennifer Bogo

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